Posted April 19, 2011

Crystal Taliefero performing with Billy Joel in Boston in 2009. Taliefero will receive the Herman C. Hudson Alumni Award for her outstanding contributions to the arts.

Here’s what’s in the limelight for the week of April 18, 2011 in local arts news.

Ball State Museum Receives National Accreditation

The Ball State University Museum of Art in Muncie, IN, is now a nationally accredited institution. So said the American Association of Museums last week, after a yearlong process of self-study of nearly every operation that takes place at the museum, and an inspection and review by members of the AAM, who found BSO Museum’s collection of 11,000 works of art and professional atmosphere worthy of the highest honor that can be bestowed on an art museum in the U.S.. The news comes at a perfect time: Coincidentally, the Ball State Museum is celebrating its seventy-fifth year at the end of this month, with a community gala dinner and dance on April 30.

Crystal L. Taliefero-Pratt Honored With Alumni Award

The IU African American Arts Institute’s Herman C. Hudson Alumni Award celebration banquet will take place tonight. This year’s recipient is Crystal L. Taliefero-Pratt, an alumna of IU who as a student performed with IU’s Soul Revue. Since graduating the singer and multi-instrumentalist has toured with the likes of John Mellencamp, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Joe Cocker and Faith Hill; in a statement of congratulations Billy Joel was effusive in his praise of her musical skills both onstage and off, as a songwriter and arranger. Taliefero-Pratt has co-created a series of children’s books, and is an active supporter of VH1’s “Save the Music” campaign. The Herman C. Hudson Alumni Award was established in 2005 in the name of the late founder of the Office of Afro-American Affairs and the Minority Achievers Program at IU Bloomington, to recognize alumni and faculty who have made outstanding contributions in the arts.

Singing Hoosiers To Represent Indiana In China

The Singing Hoosiers is a group of ninety singers from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. It was announced last week that forty of them will tour China this summer. The first of three concerts will be in Beijing on May 13; the group will then travel to Shanghai, and wrap up their visit in Hong Kong. The performances will feature a variety of American music, from Broadway show tunes to Michael Jackson, but the Singing Hoosiers will also pay homage to China with a medley of Chinese songs.

IU Librarian Receives Award

Lou Malcolm, the head of the department of Government Information and the Kent Cooper Services Department at IU Bloomington’s Wells Library, has been honored with the 2011 Documents to the People Award, which is co-sponsored by Lexis/Nexis, the Government Documents Round Table, and the American Library Association. The longtime librarian, who has spent 40 years in IU libraries, is known for her fierce dedication to keeping public documents available to the public, and her thoughtful organization of the documents at IU. In 1999, she launched the Committee on Institutional Cooperation Floppy Disk Project, to transmit federal data from what’s now an obsolete storage format to digital. She is also the head of the Indiana Light Archive for Federal Documents.

Read the news release and learn more about Lou Malcolm at the IU Newsroom.

A native of Brooklyn, NY, Rachel Lyon came to Bloomington in 2009 to pursue her MFA in Creative Writing at IU. At WFIU, she is an announcer for All Things Considered and classical music, and she produces features for Artworks. Rachel's glad to be working in radio again after a long drought since her undergraduate years, when she was a DJ for WPRB, the independent station in Princeton, NJ.

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